"I wish you _would_ tell me the cure; but time is the only one. It is not conscience though, it is cowardice." "Indeed! I should not have taken you for a coward," Susan observed. "But I am. It can be nothing else than cowardice. I know it is my duty--I know it is for the good of the world that I should do certain things. Of course I will do those things when I am ordered to do so. But, oh! how I shall shirk that horrible duty! How I shall suffer! I sometimes think I shall go mad when the time comes." "Nonsense. I've heard young medical students talk like that. Yet see how soon they get hardened into chopping and probing away into our quivering anatomies. No! You go and try my patent cure for conscience--never known to fail, cures pain at the heart, prevents softening--testimonials from Mrs. Jezebel, several empresses of Rome, and many of the nobility and gentry. Try it, Mary!" "Well, what is it?" asked the girl, laughing in spite of her melancholy frame of mind. "_A regular bad man_," replied the other fiercely--"that's my prescription, my dear. You've got a pretty face enough, so the drug can be easily 'presented,' as the doctors say. It's not a difficult medicine to procure. It is not even unpleasant to the taste at first--on the contrary; but it rather upsets you when it's working its effect and purging the morbid secretion conscience out of you. Go and get one, one of your haw-haw club dandies; get him to fall in love with you, as they will for a time. It's easy to make him do that--work on his vanity, that's all. Flatter him--you'll catch any man like that. Talk about woman's vanity--it's nothing to a man's. Then you must fall in love with him--you may find that difficult, but it is necessary, else the medicine won't work. Now after a period more or less long--after babies, coolness, insult, desertion--after your hero proves but a mean, heartless cad after all--after all this, the devil of a bit of conscience you'll find left in you, I'll guarantee." Mary looked at Susan, wondering at this strange nature, feeling a great antipathy, yet not unmixed with pity, for the vain, wicked, hardened creature by her side. At last she said, "I often wonder what you were like when you were a child, Susan."